First thing of the day I saw was this video of Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis which Christopher Webb forwarded to us. It’s OLD! as people may say, but it started my day with a smile. Or a chill. This is a creepy Watson. A very creepy Watson.

He’s basically the Weeping Angels, isn’t he? Which would have been a splendid baddie to have in the Doctor Who Adventure Games. Assuming they’re not, of course.

I thought the same too, the way he never takes a step indicates he’s programmed never to move but teleport around when the player looks away or his AI gained sentience and became lazy. Also I agree I want to see more games that use this.

And now of course I will always be wondering what Watson is doing anytime he is not onscreen in any movie / program I watch of Sherlock Holmes. This would explain so much of how sidekicks disappear and reappear randomly, I always put it down to lazt writing.

That actually seems worse than it was in Sherlock Holmes v. Cthulhu. Then Watson was just constantly STANDING BEHIND YOU each time you turned around. Creepy as fuck, but at least you could rationalise that he was somehow a soundless, swift NINJA… Some kinda 1800s SAS veteran, or some such.

Now he anticipates your EYE MOVEMENT?

I have Nemesis, I intend playing it sometime, but the evidence that Watson’s teleportation now converts each scene into a David Lynch dream sequence has me putting it on the long finger. The slightly longer finger.

I played Sherlock Holmes: The Awakening recently. Noticed this peculiar behaviour, and instantly wanted to show everyone I knew.

The best demonstration of it is when there’s a particularly large area, where you can run – while constantly looking at Waston – backwards, leaving him hundreds of metres away, only to turn around and see him standing there, staring soundlessly into your very SOUL.

I just came by to say, again, that Frogwares is the worse thing that has happened to the Holmes franchise and adventure games in general. The worse. They write terribly, they make bad puzzles, the use badly their engines. They manage to make interesting plots the most boring and annoying thing ever, as they continuosly do since their first game.

“What do you make of this, Holmes?”, said while standing over a freshly mutilated corpse comes to mind.

Fortunately or unfortunately, they fixed Weeping Watson in the remastered version of the Awakened. Despite this, he remains an absolute loon. For instance, when encountering various macabre horrors, his expression never changes. Ever. Which, in retrospect, explains a lot: Watson is possessed by Nyarlathotep.

Just as I wrote last time this came up, Watson is the real eldritch horror that I would run away from and into the open arms/tentacles of Cthulhu whilst never once looking away from Watson.

Teleportation has never been so creepy, it’s such a reprieve in all the areas where Watson doesn’t follow you around. Even then however, every time you look around you fear seeing those dead eyes and gibbous moustache.

Its been a while since I actually played it, but from what I recall it fulfilled its remit as an FP-point and click adventure game. I’m not trying to apologise for the game too much here, but, it had quite a few decent puzzles and from that perspective it was pretty good.
In the same way that an action-RPG has compromises in either Action, RPG or both, this suffered similarly. Probably because of this, I find myself forgiving this game much more than I should.
It just seems a shame that the only other game that did something similar (albeit much better) was/is Penumbra.

Oh, this is nothing. Watson moved like this in that in another of their games, The Awakened, and that was a Lovecraft/Holmes crossover. Imagine you’re carefully, quietly exploring abandoned nighttime docks, the very real possibility of running into a shoggoth around every corner heavy on your mind, when you turn a corner and AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH godDAMN it Watson, don’t DO that!

I first encountered this in the Holmes/Lovecraft crossover game. At first I thought it was supposed to be there to creep you out, but I don’t think it is, I think it’s just a budget method of having a sidekick follow you around. But it works very well as spookification technique. The only problem is that it only really works when the player backs away, then turns around, which is not normal behavior for players of games. That’s why it can be used here to have Watson following you, it’s not something the player would normally do, so it’s not generally noticable.

I think I see how this is different than in the Awakened. In the Awakened, if you weren’t looking at Watson, he moved to directly behind you. In this, he appears to have predetermined locations which he chooses based on player proximity and then moves to when you aren’t looking.

I couldn’t agree more on that! Wherever I walked in the National Gallery, Watson was behind me all the time. And when I turned around his face was like SOO close! Whenever I clicked on his face he said: “What do you think, Holmes?” And I was like: WT* WATSON YOU’RE LOOKING AT ME AS IF YOU ALREADY KNOW!!!